Past Defended

Weatherwoman surrenders

When she disappeared, fleeing from the explosion-shattered wreckage of a Manhattan town house, Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson was so perfect a symbol of the times as to be almost a macabre caricature. The date was March 6, 1970, and American society was torn by the tensions generated by the Viet Nam War and the preceding decade's civil rights agitation. Middle-class and wealthy youths were burning draft cards and marching in the streets shouting hate at the Establishment that had nurtured them. A few went beyond revolutionary rhetoric to amateur terrorism, and among them was Cathy Wilkerson.

From a wealthy family and well educated (Swarthmore '66), she had first joined the radical Students for a Democratic Society and later its violent Weatherman faction, which fought pitched battles with police in Chicago and bombed a police station and a bank in Manhattan. While her father, who owned a string of Midwestern radio stations, was on vacation in the Caribbean, Wilkerson turned over his elegant Greenwich Village home to Weatherman friends, who apparently began making bombs in the basement. A series of dynamite blasts not only demolished the house, but also killed three Weathermen.

For ten years Wilkerson, who was charged with illegal possession of dynamite and criminally negligent homicide, avoided arrest. But last week in Manhattan she turned herself in. At 35, she is a different kind of symbol from the one she had been in 1970. Now she seemed spiritually akin to the Japanese soldiers who stumbled out of Pacific jungles 20 years after the end of World War II, still vowing to win for the Emperor.

Wilkerson said she had surrendered for "personal" reasons and would not disclose where she had been for the past decade. The rest of her statement was a diatribe straight out of the '60s. She fumed against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, as if the war had not ended five years ago. She applauded "fighters for freedom and independence for Puerto Rico," though they have little following even on their own island. She maintained that "the conditions are the same" in the nation as when she disappeared.

The passions that still move Wilkerson have so cooled that long before she gave herself up, federal authorities had stopped looking for her. The FBI years ago removed the remaining Weatherman fugitives from its most-wanted list and ceased active searching for most of them because they seemed more irrelevant than dangerous.

Other Weathermen who have surrendered have been treated leniently, and there was speculation last week that Wilkerson would be allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges. Meanwhile, ironically, three former top FBI officials, including onetime Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, are awaiting trial on charges of having the agency illegally tap the phones and break into the homes of friends and relatives of fugitive Weatherman members.

The Weatherman faction took its name from a line in a Bob Dylan song: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Cathy Wilkerson seemed oblivious last week to the lesson of another Dylan song: "The times they are a-changin'."

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